RUTHFULLY YOURS

JAMES TARANTO: LET’S BLAME GROVER CLEVELAND…HE DID NOT STOP GLOBAL WARMING

Posted By Ruth King on November 2nd, 2012

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204846304578092832332179210.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

Let’s play connect-the-dots! Here’s our favorite children’s book, the New York Times op-ed page.

“Along with eight million others, the Kristofs have lost power,” writes patriarch Nicholas, “so I’ve been sending Twitter messages on my iPhone by candlelight.” Not to mention phoning it in. Can anything be more predictable than a Kristof column after a big storm titled “Will Climate Get Some Respect Now?”

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Best of the Web Today columnist James Taranto on why Democrats are unnerved by the Des Moines Register’s endorsement of Mitt Romney. Photo: Associated Press

“It’s true, of course, that no single storm or drought can be attributed to climate change,” Kristof acknowledges. But the plural of anecdote is data: “Many scientists believe that rising carbon emissions could make extreme weather–like Sandy–more likely.”

“Democrats have been AWOL on climate change, but Republicans have been even more recalcitrant,” Kristof complains. “Politicians have dropped the ball, but so have those of us in the news business. The number of articles about climate change fell by 41 percent from 2009 to 2011, according to DailyClimate.org.” Must kill more trees!

On the same page, Matthew Algeo, author of “The President Is a Sick Man,” describes how severe the weather has become. “On Tuesday, Aug. 22, in the Atlantic Ocean, four hurricanes were swirling simultaneously, an event never before recorded. . . . Wednesday night, one of the hurricanes slammed into New York City. At least 30 people were killed.” Four days later, an even more powerful hurricane killed some 2,000 in and around Savannah, Ga.

What, you don’t remember reading about those storms in the papers? That’s not because reporters are dropping the climate-change ball, but because Algeo is writing history, not news. The hurricanes in question occurred in 1893.

“Grover Cleveland did nothing,” Algeo writes. The 24th president, a Democrat, “opposed government intervention in natural disasters,” which he thought, as he once wrote in a veto message, “encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.” Just like Imaginary Mitt Romney!

But all’s well that ends well. “Into the void stepped Clara Barton, . . . who had founded the American Red Cross 12 years earlier,” Algeo writes. “Her heroic work, especially in the South, saved countless thousands from disease and starvation.”

Yet even though private charity proved sufficient in the absence of federal action, the history Algeo recounts is an indictment of Cleveland. To see why, connect the dots with the Kristof column. America was already experiencing severe weather in 1893. Yet history records that Stephen Grover Cleveland, despite having been president twice, did nothing to stop global warming.

On a related note, we got a kick out of a post by blogger Benjamin Wendell titled “The Righties Just Don’t Get It”: “Even dyed-in-the-wool conservatives like Governor Chris Christie are beginning to see the empiric truth. Global warming is real and its consequences are real.”

Empiric is right. And get a load of this: “It’s not whether things like wind power and biofuel and geothermal are feasible. It’s that they HAVE to work.” Now that’s what we call science.

Compromising Position
“Democrats, a more moderate and diverse party, believe in compromise far more than Republicans do,” writes the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne. One could have made the same observation in the 1850s, but Dionne is writing in the present: He claims to have identified “a central fact about American politics now”:

Polls show Democrats are consistently more pro-compromise. This partisan difference was especially visible–and consequential–during last year’s debt-ceiling fight. In April 2011, as the battle was taking shape, a Pew survey found that 69 percent of Democrats supported the idea of their own side making compromises. Among Republicans, by contrast, 50 percent preferred their side to “stand by their principles.” The anti-compromise number rose to 56 percent among conservative Republicans and to 68 percent among Republican or Republican-leaning independents who supported the tea party. Sympathy for compromise has risen since then, but the gap between the parties endures.

As the example of the 1850s illustrates, there is a danger in setting up “compromise” as a normative standard. But it isn’t clear that’s what the respondents to polls like this are doing, anyway. An alternative explanation is that the Democratic leadership is more extreme, relative to the rank and file, than the Republican leadership–and therefore individual Democrats want the party to “compromise” so it will be more in line with their own views.

No True Scotsman Would Vote Against a Texas Sharpshooter
Andrew Sullivan manages to combine two major informal fallacies in his latest hysterical defense of President Obama:

I have no idea what standard people are using to declare Obama’s first term a failure. To save us from a Great Depression, rescue the auto industry, re-regulate Wall Street, decimate al Qaeda, kill bin Laden and Qaddafi and provide universal healthcare? That’s failure?

Unemployment is lower now than it was when he took office, and moving downward. Next year’s IMF-predicted US growth is higher than any other developed country. Compared with austerity-ridden Europe, where unemployment is still climbing, Obama’s, Geithner’s and Bernanke’s leadership has been stellar. The US has never exported as much as now as a percentage of GDP ever.

This is the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. As FallacyFiles.org explains: “The Texas sharpshooter is a fabled marksman who fires his gun randomly at the side of a barn, then paints a bullseye around the spot where the most bullet holes cluster.”

“What I cannot understand,” Sullivan goes on, “is how those who voted for [Obama] in 2008 because they wanted real change can explain why they may vote against him now. It makes no sense. . . . If you voted for Obama in 2008 and don’t in 2012, you never really voted for him in 2008.” That’s the no-true-Scotsman fallacy, something Sullivan has in common with Todd Akin.

Two Papers in One!–I

• “With FEMA and Obama’s Response to Hurricane Sandy, ‘Big Government’ Isn’t Just an Election Talking Point: You know when big government is all right for some of the phonies, in government and in the media, who rail constantly against it? When we get hit the way we got hit this week.”–headline and subheadline, Mike Lupica column, Daily News (New York), Nov. 1
• “Despair Sets In for some Coney Island Residents as Living Conditions Deteriorate Rapidly in Sandy’s Wake: ‘We are Katrina’ says one desperate resident. ‘Everyone cares about Manhattan. No one is looking out for us.’ “–headline and subheadline, news story, Daily News, Nov. 1

Two Papers in One!–II

• “Most wrongheaded of all is [the Supreme Court’s] insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.”–editorial, New York Times, Jan. 22, 2010
• “The state’s Roman Catholic leaders have played a vocal role in trying to turn out a big ‘no’ vote [on a Washington state ballot measure that would legalize same-sex marriage] by Catholic parishioners. But major corporate players in the Seattle area, including Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks, are supporting the measure. That is an encouraging development for the future of the issue nationwide.”–editorial, New York Times, Oct. 31, 2012

The Weissmann Terrier Is a Very Rare Breed
Quick, what comes to mind when you hear “Gucci bags and massage parlors”? For Jordan Weissmann of The Atlantic, the answer appears to be “black people”: “The phrase ‘Gucci bags and massage parlors’ sounds frighteningly close to a dog whistle a la ‘welfare queens,’ ” he writes, also referring to it as a “racially loaded broadside.”

It was Rep. Steve King who blew the whistle that set off Weissmann’s barking, as the Puffington Host reports:

“I want to get them the resources that are necessary to lift them out of this water and the sand and the ashes and the death that’s over there in the East Coast and especially in the Northeast,” King said during a Tuesday evening debate in Mason City, Iowa.

“But not one big shot to just open up the checkbook, because they spent it on Gucci bags and massage parlors and everything you can think of in addition to what was necessary,” he said later, referring to Hurricane Katrina.

Weissmann admits that King “was gesturing towards a substantive point,” which is to say that his statement was factually accurate. A Government Accountability report observed that after Katrina, “debit cards were used for items or services such as a Caribbean vacation, professional football tickets, and adult entertainment, which do not appear to be necessary to satisfy disaster-related needs as defined by FEMA regulations.” Weissmann even finds an example of a $400 charge to the Swedish Institute, an Irving, Texas, massage parlor. He doesn’t mention any Gucci bags, but his search appears to have been less than exhaustive.

While Weissmann was complaining about the heretofore undiscovered racial connotations of “Gucci bags and massage parlors,” this was happening at a campaign event in Georgia, according to the Monroe County Reporter:

Two icons of the civil rights movement visited Forsyth on Saturday to campaign for the reelection of Barack Obama. Andrew Young and Rev. Dr. James [sic; actually Joseph] Lowery spoke at St. James Baptist Church as part of a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) tour across Georgia to encourage black voters to cast ballots for Obama. . . .

Lowery said that when he was a young militant, he used to say all white folks were going to hell. Then he mellowed and just said most of them were. Now, he said, he is back to where he was.

“I’m frightened by the level of hatred and bitterness coming out in this election,” said Lowery.

Hmm, we wonder if there are any hidden racial connotations to “all white folks are going to hell.” As the Washington Examiner notes, in 2009 Lowery delivered the benediction at Obama’s inauguration and later received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Unenthusiastic Endorsement Watch

• “No issue weighs on voters’ minds — and ours — more than the economy. On that, Obama has performed adequately. . . . That’s not to say that the economic stimulus plan was beautifully executed. It was not. It was rife with waste. Frankly, it showcased an inexperienced president. Of course, all presidents are inexperienced presidents in their first year. While we’re sometimes frustrated by Obama’s wonkish, plodding style, we respect his patience. . . . Obamacare is not ideal, but Obama, like us, concluded that perfect should not be the enemy of good. . . . Under Obama, progress has been slow or nonexistent on key fronts. . . . Much more remains to be done. For that, we’re sticking with the guy who got us this far.”–editorial, Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.), Oct. 27
• “Four years ago, The Economist endorsed Barack Obama for the White House with enthusiasm. . . . Mr Obama’s first term has been patchy. . . . No administration in many decades has had such a poor appreciation of commerce. Previous Democrats, notably Bill Clinton, raised taxes, but still understood capitalism. Bashing business seems second nature to many of the people around Mr Obama. . . . The White House itself has too often seemed insular and left-leaning. . . . Above all, Mr Obama has shown no readiness to tackle the main domestic issue confronting the next president. . . . We very much hope that whichever of these men wins office will prove our pessimism wrong. . . . This election offers American voters an unedifying choice. Many of The Economist’s readers, especially those who run businesses in America, may well conclude that nothing could be worse than another four years of Mr Obama. We beg to differ. . . . This newspaper [sic] would stick with the devil it knows, and re-elect him.”–editorial, The Economist, Nov. 3 issue
• “The question Americans should be asking ourselves isn’t whether we’re better off than we were four years ago. It’s whether we’re better off than we were 80 years ago.”–Robert McElvaine, New York Times website, Oct. 31

And They Said Obama Was an Intellectual
“Republicans finally settled on a true Plutarch–Mitt Romney–as their banner carrier.”–Katrina vanden Heuvel, Washington Post, Oct. 31

Reliable Sources
Here’s a very strange story from the Associated Press:

A northeast Kansas newspaper has been ordered to identify a person who posted a comment on its website about a story on a murder trial for which that commenter was serving as a juror.

Shawnee County District Judge Steven Ebberts last week denied a request by The Topeka Capital-Journal to quash a district attorney’s subpoena seeking the name, address and Internet Protocol address of a poster who goes by the pseudonym “BePrepared.” . . .

While the man’s name was reported by the newspaper in coverage of the Sept. 6 hearing, The Associated Press isn’t naming him because he has not been charged with a crime. Ebberts’ decision noted that interference with the judicial process is a felony.

So let’s see if we have this straight. The AP is withholding the man’s name, even though it’s already appeared in the newspaper that is resisting prosecutors’ demands to tell them his name.

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